Our president, Karsten Gerloff, wrote a series of articles about software
patents pointing at the current situation at
the European Union level and he has
published his notes about "The Case Against Patents", a recent draft paper
by economists Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine. He concludes that
we cannot "leave it to the EPO" and that "patent policy
needs to be integrated into a larger innovation policy strategy"within the EU.

France's Prime Minister issues guideline in favour of Free Software

After Italy's
new law on software procurement which clearly prefers Free Software upon
non-free software, France also took action: On September 19th France's Prime
Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault signed
a guideline, addressed to all ministries, that the French public
administration should favour Free Software. The advantages the Prime Minister sees
in Free Software, are its lower costs and that it increases flexibility and
competition in the IT market. The public administration should make "an
educated choice", and do "a systematic review of free alternatives when doing
development and major revisions of applications."

The cross-ministry IT services give a set of recommendations to be implemented
by the French ministries aiming at developing and improving the use of Free
Software such as: find Free Software alternatives, follow and contribute to
the communities, or improve the culture of Free Software and Free licences.

Something completely different

Free Software policies from France, Italy, UK, or Sweden were also a
topic in the German Parliament. On Friday 21st September, your editor was
invited to speak there as an expert for Free Software. In the next weeks you
will receive a summary on this topic, but, until then you can take a look at the questions
your editor had to answer before it, as well as links to the written
statements from the other invited experts.

There is information that the City of Freiburg wants to switch to a
proprietary office suite. FSFE, together with OSB Alliance and BIKT, wrote an open letter about it asking
several questions to the City's officials (German). EC's joinup reported
about it in English.

"How can I change the license, so my software cannot be used for military
use?" Richard Stallman published
an article arguing, why a program must not restrict what jobs its users
do with it, and why we cannot stop torture through software licenses.

"Who controls the internet controls the data. Who controls the data,
controls the future", says Georg (T)ORwell in the latest episode "Big
Brother is WWWatching you" from Juice Rap News (youtube link, you can
use youtube-dl to download
it). It is about several Free Software connected topics and the advantages of
TOR, and also features the
Linksys-WRT-54 router, which was the first GNU GPL violation court case
worldwide.